Self-interest disguised as condescension
June 28, 2014
At DocSpot, our mission is to connect people with the right health care by helping them navigate publicly available information. We believe the first step of that mission is to help connect people with an appropriate medical provider, and we look forward to helping people navigate other aspects of their care as the opportunities arise. We are just at the start of that mission, so we hope you will come back often to see how things are developing.
An underlying philosophy of our work is that right care means different things to different people. We also recognize that doctors are multidimensional people. So, instead of trying to determine which doctors are "better" than others, we offer a variety of filter options that individuals can apply to more quickly discover providers that fit their needs.
June 28, 2014
There's been an increasing drumbeat for the disclosure of health care prices. The Washingon Post published an article that discusses the failure of a state legislature to create an all-payer claims database that would help consumers compare health care prices. The main opponent? The state's largest private insurer, Premera. An earlier article noted "a broad coalition" that included big businesses such as Boeing.
What was Premera's response? Executives were reported to have indicated that they "favor transparency" but doubt "the usefulness of the all-payer claims database if it's not coupled with information about what consumers would actually pay under their insurance plans... 'We have not seen evidence they're ready for that level of shopping.'" Premera executives are essentially saying that they can't possibly imagine how this data could be useful, and that consumers can't handle this level of sophisticated shopping. Their words underestimate consumers. Much more likely, though, the executives floated those lines so they wouldn't have to address the real reason behind their reluctance to support transparency for the larger population (which the article discusses).
May 25, 2014
Later this week, we plan on releasing an update to our user interface. It's been a while since we've changed the basic color palette of this site, and we've been feeling that the look-and-feel has started to feel dated. Our complete user interface overhaul won't be finished this week, but will likely continue over the next few weeks.
If you have any thoughts about the changes, please let us know.
May 17, 2014
Health Care Cost Institute announced that they will be working with three major insurance companies to make health care prices available to consumers, starting in 2015. On the face of it, this announcement has tremendous importance for the health care transparency movement, and would have been hard to imagine even a few years ago. If this portal actually comes to pass, it would be a very exciting moment. We need to wait to see, however, how much information is actually disclosed, and whether the portal will end up as useful as we might imagine.
The move seems to make a lot of sense for the insurers. By arming their members with additional cost and quality information, members can make better decisions, hopefully saving both the members and insurers more money in the process. To take things a step further, insurers could make this information freely available in a standardized format so that smaller scale innovators can build on top of this data, potentially in more engaging ways.
May 10, 2014
More and more hospitals are sending surveys to their patients and making the results publicly available on their website. This is a great step forward and marks the recognition from the medical community that patient perceptions of service are actually important. Hospitals can offer the benefit of assuring viewers of the this data that the survey respondent has actually experienced care at the hospital (similar to the concept of a verified buyer on Amazon.com).
Hopefully, this trend continues across the nation, giving consumers more data to make decisions.
May 02, 2014
We rolled out another long-awaited feature this week: the ability to sort provider profiles (by patient rating or by distance). Sometimes, you don't want filter providers out completely, but you do want to see how they compare with one another along a certain dimension. For example, if you just wanted to see which doctors are closest to your home or office, the sort-by-distance feature allows you to do so.
When sorting by patient ratings, the order might be slightly different from what you might expect. Instead of sorting strictly by average patient ratings, we also consider how many reviews contributed to that average score. For example, a provider that received 10 reviews that average of 4.8 stars would be regarded as rated higher than a provider that received a single 5-star review. As the number of reviews increase, the more confident we are that the average score is representative of the patients' opinions.
Over time, we plan on adding other dimensions to sort by. If you have any ideas for what we should add, please let us know.